So I love long games of Civ. Epic is my usual "pace" chosen for play. However, every time I play, regardless of my settings — I never feel as if the world spends enough time in each given "age". A common sequence of events, is I'll discover a technology unlocking, say, a new military unit. I'll tell one of my more productive cities to begin producing them as soon as they finish their whatever-they-were-building-before, while I continue researching towards other military units, and by the time I've finished building two or so swordsman I have the tech for longswordsman and now my old troops are outdated. Later on, as my research speeds up (as it often does) I'll finally get a couple riflemen to the front lines, just in time to provide ground support for the stealth bomber I bought. Quite often I forgo the entire process and build only city-defense troops until I get into Industrial or later eras.
Is there a way to modify this? As in, set research and policy acquisition to an Epic game pace while leaving production at a slightly faster (roughly Marathon?) pace, to allow more of a chance to play around with an Ancient/Classical/Medieval military?
Best Answer
I believe you can just modify CIV5GameSpeeds.xml to suit your tastes. It will be in the Assets\Gameplay\XML\GameInfo folder of your Civ 5 folder.
Each difficulty level is listed, with a bunch of percentages that are applied to the cost of everything. The ones you are likely interested in are TrainPercent (presumably affecting the cost of units) and ConstructPercent (presumably affecting the cost of buildings). I'm not sure about CreatePercent, I think that may affect the cost of Wonders, but I'm not certain. And there is also BuildPercent, not sure what that is. So just take a text editor, adjust the values for the difficulty level you want to play, and then start a new game.
I guess the other option would be to start with the normal game length and just increase the relatively obvious settings for Research and Culture percent (if that really is all you want to slow down). I have a feeling this won't necessarily give the feeling you want though, you'll just end up with a game that feels like it is moving fast but you can't research anything.